When Social Sciences Meet the Arts: The Process of Collaboration

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Kristen Schilt, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago; and Chase Joynt, Toronto-based multi-media artist and writer

In this talk, Chase Joynt, a Canadian multi-media artist, and Kristen Schilt, an assistant professor of Sociology, discuss their year-long collaboration sponsored by a Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice & Scholarship at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Joynt and Schilt have become established voices speaking about the transgender community – Joynt by making art that is based in his own experiences as a transgender man, and Schilt as a cisgender sociologist representing the experiences of transgender people. In this collaborative project, they seek to disrupt these positionalities of scholarly and experiential authority. Their goal is to examine the processes of constructing public narratives about what it means to be transgender in the social sciences and the arts, to reveal what gets left out (and why), and to investigate what these lacunae could mean for conventionalized claims of “truth” and “authenticity.” They will discuss their upcoming multi-media installation project and how it seeks to address their areas of interest through hybridized and experimental modes of artistic and theoretical inquiry.

Kristen Schilt is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her research interests center on sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. In 2010, she published the monograph, Just One of the Guys? Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality (University of Chicago Press). In this book, she illustrates how the workplace experiences of transgender men can help to illuminate the organizational and interactional processes that contribute to the persistence of gender, race, and sexuality-based inequalities in the workplace.

Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based multi-media artist and writer. Recently awarded the EP Canada/Canada Film Capital Award for Emerging Canadian Artist, Chase's films and gallery work are currently being exhibited internationally. In 2013-2014, he is in residence as a Visiting Artist and Scholar at the University of Chicago where he holds a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice & Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.